2.1.1-Pilferingapples
Brick!club Les Miserables Cosette: Waterloo: What You See On The Way From Nivelles What You See On The Way From Nivelles All right, I think this is the most profound change towards a section BEFORE READING that involvement with this club and this fandom have given me. I started in on Waterloo this morning and (a) CRIED A LOT WHY and (b) am REALLY EXCITED, I got like halfway through. This is WATERLOO. It was supposed to be a Feels-free zone. Instead there’s a bird singing on a branch “probably in love” while Hugo surveys all the carnage of history now grown over and all I can think about is what People What Know The Things have said about how this section is really about Marius AND BUT ALSO how this is Cosette’s book, Cosette the Lark. And her story starts with a song about love, laid over the wreckage of battle; with an image of quiet life covering the wounds left by war. And there’s a poster for a traveling show— just a traveling show, something passing through, like the war passed through, providing brief noise but now it’s just a faded advertisement, and what’s still there is the duck pond and the spruce bird, and a minor tourist attraction. And I think Fantine’s story, starting with the Bishop, ending with a grave, was about what history swallows; Fantine was born and died in anonymity. But Cosette’s story, which lasts much beyond this book, is about what ultimately survives, and the way the forgotten things of history leave craters and lives that go on, and then I have to go lie down again. …Honestly I got so worked up over the STUPID BIRD I didn’t even notice the Walk-through-the-door-into-a-new-volume trick that everyone else has commented on. Whoops. Tomorrow: Some horrible HORRIBLE things, and maybe I’ll post before Technically Still Today Somewhere! Commentary Lecapunk Excuse me while I weep profusely because OW, FEELINGS. (I kind of also Love Cosette a Whole Lot, and the concept of this being foreshadowing for all the awfulness that history will grow over, and how the beauty and love will always be there afterwards kind of is killing me because OW NATURE AND LOVE AND ROMANTICISM; I AM STABBED IN MY PROUVAIRE GLAND) Yep, everyone else understands Important Things That Are Not Javert-Related much better than I do. Grumpyfaceurn *swallows* Ugh ok now I’m having a (very small) oh, I get it moment. (And really want to reread the chapter but if I do that now I’ll get nothing else done today and I’ve got a lot of work to get done today…) Ceruleancrowns oh wow, i didn’t make that connection. i am now crying over waterloo because COSETTE. Gascon-en-exile I’d forgotten about this deceptively innocuous-seeming opening chapter, though since this dreaded livre is practically an essay on historical theory it’s fitting that Hugo inserts himself (probably - postmodernism is so habitually skeptical that even when an author explicitly identifies with a narrator we still feel the need to question it) on a sort of Romantic idyll that ends in a moment of historical contemplation as opposed to poetical contemplation. Almost half a century later Waterloo has little relevance to its surroundings except as a tourist attraction, and even that role is primarily created and encouraged by the locals. It’s the peasant woman who tells the narrator of the significance of the holes in the wall and also who identifies Hougomont, so even with the lion statue there’s the sense of history (and historical importance) as informal social construction. Like the opening of Tome I, it’s very Faulknerian. As I mentioned a while back, this livre also contains obvious parallels to relevant sections of War and Peace, so a bit of Tolstoy discussion will probably be forthcoming. Both comment upon the nature of history using the most infamous figure in 19th century Europe as a case study, and while I don’t have it in me to go back and read War and Peace (especially those parts - wake me up when Rostov starts drooling over the tsar again, please) I remember enough for a general summary. Oh, and if it weren’t already well-known from miscellaneous writing on my blog, it will be noted that I hate Buonaparte for a reason that neither Hugo nor Tolstoy ever addresses. It’s a good thing neither of them are that fond of him either. Kalevala-sage Heretic as this statement may be, allow it to be known that I have little interest in the historiopolitical side of Les Misérables—I’m here above all for the queerness as my previous reading(s) haven’t had as much of an eye for it, and I’ll freely vouch for the religious and linguistic interest of the novel’s later asides on monasticism and argot, but frankly am more apt to associate the name “Waterloo” with the ABBA song and the university I nearly attended. That’s not to say, though, that I’d dismiss this livre as unimportant. The battleground is introduced with our dreamer of a narrator meandering almost haphazardly into the scene just as he meandered almost haphazardly into the fray of the June rebellion in a manner as to strike the reader with the ease with which one in Europe can find oneself vis-à-vis with history. This may be incorrect, but I have a vague recollection that Denny’s (?) rationale for the slight abridgment of his translation entailed something about Hugo’s histories being essential to the French reader, but irrelevant to the Anglophone; alas, I’m not French in any sense (despite caring a whole lot more for France and, for that matter, Québec, than I do for my hereditary homeland), but I can see the merit in the essentialist side of his argument through “Waterloo“‘s demonstration that a Frenchman, surrounded by and indeed living on his ancestral territory, may stumble into a landmark at any time and ought to know something about it. As for my apathy, I’ll argue that European history surrounds Europeans in a manner that isn’t quite translatable to the Americas, not with our culture-effacing melting-pot-where-nothing-melts attitude; so please excuse the fact that I can’t name all the presidents…double standard? Never! Also I had most of my schooling in Canada. All stumbling aside, though, Hugo’s transition from the first tome by means of a self-insert narrator is excellently suited: perhaps his observations are wide-angled, but they’re still personable in a way history alone can’t be, and thus a bit of a compromise between the plotwise first tome and what is to come.